To some degree, all Christmas stories are about learning to properly value your family and friends (packaged with a neat little bow as The True Meaning of Christmas™). This is especially true of family Christmas stories beginning in the 20th century, particularly those with overworked fathers struggling to provide a meaningful holiday for a family from whom they’ve become disconnected. You know the type.
In Christmas 365 our lead is Peter Rockwell, and after being forced to stay late at the office on Christmas Eve, and getting into a fist fight at the mall, he’s cooked up a plan to make it up to his family: the 25th of every month will be a full-blown Christmas, with presents and decorations and a fancy dinner, etc. All of the ways this can go wrong flash before your eyes as soon as he announces his plan, because it’s the only way it can go. And I can’t wait to watch it all unfold.
Tonally, the script by Mikey Way and Jonathan Rivera is a lightly absurdist screwball comedy, 30 Rock probably being its closest relative. One scene has dialogue boxes playing out what sounds like Peter in therapy, talking about feeling like he’s losing his family, only to reveal that Peter is having this conversation with a mall Santa, while firmly seated on the man’s lap. Characters can occasionally sound like lunatics, but perhaps no one is so untethered from reality that pathos isn’t possible. (As the focal character, Peter gets most of this shading in this first issue, including several indirect references to a complicated relationship with his recently-deceased, Christmas-loving, alcoholic father. Surely there’s a lot more to unpack there).
Artist Piotr Kowalski helps sell the tone with his scratchy, detailed art that gives a sense of weight to the characters, and an arsenal of very funny facial expressions. Kowalski has a knack for comedy with an edge, which is on full display in another Dark Horse series, Where Monsters Lie, about a suburban HOA home to horror movie-style slashers. While I doubt this series will get that dark, the flaming tree on the cover certainly hints at all kinds of epic disasters.
Christmas 365 is published by Dark Horse Comics, and is available wherever comic books are sold.
About the writer
Anthony Pizzo
Anthony Pizzo is a writer/artist/photographer who currently works in medicine in order to “actually make a living.” He is currently figuring out how to move into any overlooked spaces at Walt Disney World.
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Now I have a hot take. Ho-Ho-Ho.
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Oh, this could end SO badly. Is it a limited series of 12 issues, or ongoing? (Or ‘too soon to tell?’)
Too soon to tell. There’s nothing on the inside cover to indicate that it’s a limited series, so I’ll bet they’re waiting to see how sales are.
I am curious to know how much you can get out of a month of holidays gone wrong…